Love Letters
by BrDPirateMan
Summary: It's Valentine's Day, and Uzuki receives a few love letters written by the craziest Reapers around! Is Valentine's Day supposed to be this weird?


**Love Letters  
><strong>by BrDPirateMan

"Here, Uzuki." Kariya handed his Reaper co-worker a wad of sealed envelopes.

Uzuki's eyes were furrowed in puzzlement as she took them and glanced at each one quickly. None of them had any addresses written on them, or anything for that matter, save for a single similarity: they all had "To: Uzuki Yashiro" written on it.

"What are these?" she asked, though she could already guess.

Kariya pushed his tinted glasses down his nose a little so he could look at her clearly. With a cheeky sneer, he didn't answer so much as simply replied, "Well, it's Valentine's Day after all. What'd you think they are?"

"Love letters?" Uzuki sighed, combing her pink hair with a hand. "Huh."

It was a lovely day and the two Reapers were having some fun on their day off – which happened to be Valentine's Day. As they were waiting for their order to come around in a ramen shop, Kariya remembered about the letters he had somehow found instead of Uzuki, and now he gave them to her.

Seeing how disinterested she looked, Kariya pressed her to open the letters. He was more curious than she was about their contents. "Go on," he said, almost pleadingly. "It'll be fun to see what they've written for you. Open 'em up, why don't you!"

"It'll be a pain to have to read so many icky and sappy things that I don't even care about."

"But today's our day off, and it's not like we have anything to do. Besides, it's not much of a hassle… There's only about three or four letters. How long can they be?"

Uzuki hesitated for a bit before shrugging. "Ah well, whatever." She fingered the first letter in the pile. With deft fingers, she neatly pried up the loose flap in the envelope and gently ripped it open. A mild look of disgust blazed across her face in a frown when she saw how pink the paper was.

"It matches your hair," chuckled Kariya.

"Can it."

As she was about to unfold the offending letter, Kariya quickly pointed out, "Hey, Uzuki, notice how that envelope you just opened has some stains on them?"

She looked. Indeed, it was slightly marred with a splotch of… "Is that gravy?"

"Looks like it." He picked it up and examined it carefully. "Yup. It's gravy. Ramen gravy, perhaps? Heh… I wonder who'd be careless enough to dirty their love letters…"

Uzuki ignored him and laid the letter out on the table for both of them to see. This first letter, written in crisp and clear handwriting, went as follows:

_Oh, Uzuki!_

_The apple of my eye!_

_The fresh chicken on my platter!_

_Nothing can describe how smitten I was with you when I first saw you. The moment you entered my life, it was like I had found the perfect recipe. You have no idea how much my heart is braised with the gravy of my love!_

_Your loveliness, it strikes me like the kick of fine wine. The rush of euphoria as a result of gazing upon your delectable beauty is like the rush of wasabi up my nostrils. My heart burns charcoal-black with romantic fury and indigestion as you waft into my mind like a heavenly aroma… It's so strong a feeling that not even the hottest curry can match! I never tire of enjoying the sight of your pretty eyes, sparkling like fat in my soup. And when I feel your piercing glare on me, my insides melt like ice-cream. Oh, ice-cream!_

_The contours of your body are so like those of a finely roasted chicken. You're so delicious I want to sink my teeth into you! And yet, you seem so far away, so I cannot… How elusive you are, like the expensive spice of saffron!_

_How I so often do pirouettes in the kitchen thinking about you, singing to my pots and pans! My voice reaches out to you, sending rhythms of honey and milk your way. I serenade you in my sleep, promising treasures of puddings and mustard. My heart bleeds like ketchup as I think about how I desire to pour olive oil all over your soul! So smooth, so delicate… I'm impatient and dying for a taste test!_

_I know how there are others who vie for your attention, but please, heed them no mind! My competitors are many, but they cannot compare to the true feelings of a bona fide chef! Rest assured, for these small fry, I shall pound them, mince them and char their bones black! Only you can be the fine entrée of our dinner together!_

_Alas, should you not sample my affection, the tomato of my soul will be forever bruised. Oh, the sadness of a culinary fantasy unfulfilled! My disappointment would be like a dish that has had too much salt added, burned at the stove, and spat on by everyone! Please, I beg of you, do not leave me like this, hanging high and dry like the pans in my kitchen!_

_I await the fruit of your love, my sultry bowl of ramen. Keep it fresh._

_Love,  
><em>_Your Secret Chef_

Upon finishing the letter, the two Reapers stared at it in shock, pondering briefly over who could come up with something so irredeemably horrible.

Kariya spoke up after a while. "Say, Uzuki… you don't think…?"

Bristling with disgust, Uzuki folded her arms across her chest protectively. "There's only one person I know who'd write like this."

"Mr… Higashizawa? The crazy chef guy?"

She furiously crumpled the letter up into a ball, imagining it to be her secret admirer from hell (or rather, hell's kitchen). Then with awe-inspiring accuracy, she hurled it in the direction of the nearest wastepaper bin and it plopped inside beautifully, lost forever.

"That was way too icky for words," she said, cringing. "The GM seriously sounded like he wanted to eat me! Yuck!"

"Hey now, there's always the next love letter," consoled Kariya, "and who knows, maybe it's be more tolerable than this one."

"'Maybe' is a dangerous word, you know."

She absent-mindedly set about opening the next letter. Somewhere deep inside her psyche, she didn't want to, but another part of her – albeit a tiny miniscule part – was just as curious as his partner to look upon its contents that were waiting to be uncovered. Before the conflicting halves of her brain had any chance for heated debate, her fingers had already finished acting on their own and the letter was placed before her.

_Yo Uzuki,_

_If I could add you and I together, my happiness would be equal to infinity to the power of infinity. My logic is as irrational as irrational numbers, yes? But it's true! I am zetta hopelessly, completely in love with you._

_But never mind my perhaps feeble attempt at humour. Because at the end of the day, the math of my love is all that matters, and I hope that with this letter it can reach the x of your heart!_

_I'm not shallow. I'm not like the curve that lies too shamelessly low on the graph, straying into negative thoughts that go below the waist… I mean, x-axis. I'm no odd number; I'm smooth and even. So many other factoring hectopascals – too many – are unrefined and undefined, but I ain't no hapless fraction either. My love for you is like a whole number – wholesome without straggling decimals!_

_Any sound can shake the air, and my voice can shake the heart, but… you can shake my world! When I beheld your beauty, I was humbled. I am so awe-struck by the tangents of your curves that I can't stop making junk sculptures of you in my backyard. Oh sweetie pi, I so wish you could take a deep hard look at the love that is forever rising exponentially inside my soul!_

_You are my everything. My complete set in a Venn diagram. You are the result of flawlessness divided by zero. You are the trash that sits the highest atop my mountains of garbage, but please don't take offence! Such is the greatest compliment that one can receive from a mathematician whose beauty = your beauty! Your integration is interesting, your subtraction substantial, and your division divine!_

_Every night I so feverishly fantasise about you as a mathematical identity. Perish my imagination and make my dreams a reality! We could go back to my pad, and have a nice meal of numbers: how do _double_ hamburgers bought from _7-Eleven_ sound, washed down with zetta bountiful amounts of _7_-Up and Pepsi _100_? Some recite love poems but I'm not one of those old-fashioned nerds so I'll recite all the numbers in pi instead. An impossible task, I know, but I'll do it. Trees may drop apples, but for you I'll drop the freaking moon._

_And if you're really willing… we could derive each other's clothes and round them off to zero for one intense night of addition and multiplication. How the temptation burns me within at a speed of 299,792,458 m/s!_

_When at last the day arrives when you accept that our equations are simultaneous, no formula can quite calculate in detail how significant my happiness is! Even to the millionth decimal place it's impossible to fathom how deep my infatuation for you goes._

_Wait no longer, Uzuki. Don't zetta delay; become the solution to my equation!_

_Love,  
><em>_Your Secret Mathematician_

If Uzuki and Kariya's mouths were gaping by the end of Higashizawa's letter, this one made them so slack-jawed that their chins were touching the floor.

The pink-haired Reaper's hair was close to falling out from the utter revulsion from reading a piece of work that was even worse than the first one. "What a load of… This is…" She was struggling for a suitable barrage of insults that would satisfy her need to dispel her disgust yet would be polite-sounding enough to not cause the other customers to stare at her accusingly for bad manners.

At last she settled for, "Gah! I give up. This is crazy!" which, while not very impactful, managed to alleviate her discomfort somewhat.

"Ooh, let me guess," said an amused Kariya, "Sho Minamimoto, the resident self-proclaimed math genius?"

"Who else can it be? !" snapped Uzuki, folding it up. "Seriously, the way he talks in normal conversations are far from normal!"

"Well, he's well-known among the Reapers as something of an eccentric character, after all."

"Doesn't mean that half of the things he says have to make no sense."

Suddenly, Uzuki's phone screamed to the beat of a popular Japanese pop song. When she answered – "Hello?" – the reply on the other end of the line was strange and stilted.

"I… I like…"

The caller sounded too nervous or distraught to get another word in. Disgusted, Uzuki frowned at her phone and hung up.

"Who was that?" asked Kariya.

"Probably some prank caller with a lot of time on his hands. Again." Uzuki made a face and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. "It's so annoying!"

He smiled. "You sure it's not someone who wants to confess his unending love to you?"

"Wh-What's that supposed to mean? !"

XOXOXOXOXO

Meanwhile, at Molco, hunched over in a phone booth, a Reaper moodily placed the receiver back into its place. Underneath his oversized hooded jacket, a decorative chain could be seen hanging from his belt. Etched into it was his name, "BJ".

"Phone booth of love, my butt," he sniffled, "That was the fifth time Uzuki rejected me in a week! I thought that today being Valentine's Day I'd have a higher chance of success… I even checked the horoscopes, and Sagittarius people are supposed to have great luck today! And then what happens? Nothing!"

He stormed out of the phone booth, hiding his teary eyes beneath his handkerchief mask.

"I'm never believing these love rumours again!" he wailed down the street. And so, BJ spent the rest of Valentine's Day sulking in a corner of Stride, playing Tin Pin over and over again…

…and, much to his chagrin, losing to some kid with a bandanna and a ridiculous hairstyle.

XOXOXOXOXO

Ahem… Well, back to where our heroes left off…

Uzuki was still busy ranting about the ridiculousness of the two letters she had just read. When the waiter brought them their ramen, she promptly used the second letter as a mat for her noodle bowl.

She noticed how Kariya was eyeing the remaining unopened letter and let out a sigh of slight exasperation. "Why are you so interested in these goofy love letters?"

"Because it's like a surprise," he replied coolly and without a moment's thought. "It's exciting to wonder who might have a fancy on you."

Uzuki made a face. "Well, not for me it isn't! But fine, I'll indulge you. Really, Kariya, you're a handful at the best of times! I'll bet this one will be the worst of the whole bunch."

The third envelope took the brunt of her needlessly brutal fingers, torn asunder and clawed into many, many pieces. This letter was written on perfectly bleached white paper, and apart from the creases where it was folded up to fit into the envelope, it was flawlessly clean. There were only three lines consisting of a few words each. Though this letter bore blissfully shorter contents than its long-winded cousins, they had a much more profound meaning to them.

_Dear Uzuki,_

_Be mine. :D_

_From Kariya_

Just six words. Well, seven if you counted the ":D".

But they had all the impact of a nuclear explosion on Uzuki. And some.

At first, all she could do was stare at it in confusion. Then as disbelief gave way to incredulity and then utter shock, it dawned on her that the admirer in question was the very person sitting across her right now. Kariya wore a smirk on his face as he chewed on his noodles languidly, but all the while his gaze on her never faltered.

"Still think it's the worst of the bunch?" he said, grinning through a mouthful of ramen. "By the way, I'd like your answer, if you will."

A blush of increasing colour spread across Uzuki's cheeks. She stammered, "A-At least let me finish my ramen first!" And she tucked into her bowl of ramen with such startling ferocity and quickness that everyone in the ramen shop noticed and cringed. _What's wrong with this girl?_ they must have been thinking.

"I'm waiting," said Kariya. "But I want your answer eventually."

For the remainder of their meal, he dodged all the ramen sauce that was unceremoniously splattering everywhere as a result of Uzuki's speed-eating.

XOXOXOXOXO

"You're an idiot, Kariya."

"Hmm? Now how am I an idiot?"

"Well, you know!" Uzuki was fiddling with her hair nervously. "You could have chosen a less… uh, shocking way to confess your feelings!"

"Really?" teased the lollipop-sucking Reaper. "Like how?"

"How should I know about that!" She tossed her free hand into the air in a show of slight annoyance. "Seriously, writing love letters in this day and age is just so old-fashioned. Are you some hopeless romantic or what?"

Kariya simply chuckled, choosing not to say anything more about the topic. He didn't mind Uzuki berating him because frankly, she was relatively gentle about it and it was all a mask for her true emotions within. He was happy that she wasn't in denial about it either. She was holding his hand as they walked down the streets.

And if it pleases everyone, her answer to his letter was yes.

Valentine's Day was a huge success for Kariya…

XOXOXOXOXO

…but as for the other Reapers, it was a different story, and it wasn't so great.

Food fanatic Yodai Higashizawa and math mangler Sho Minamimoto had been waiting all day for the object of their affection to answer their calls of love, but as luck would have it, nothing happened.

"I wonder what went wrong," lamented Higashizawa, huddled in the living room of his apartment eating his tenth tub of ice-cream. "Was my confession not scrumptious enough? Maybe it could have used more pizzas… I mean, pizzazz."

He set his finished tub on the coffee table amongst all the other emptied tubs – chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, even yam – and stood up, a sudden surge of confidence bursting through his sugar-laced bloodstreams.

"I'll cook up another idea one of these days. In the meantime, this is no time to feel sorry for myself!"

He spent the evening pirouetting in the kitchen like a ballerina while baking up a storm, singing weird culinary songs to a love that would never happen. "Glorious, glorious foooooood…!"

Sho watched the beautiful sunset from the top of his junk mountain, constructed right in the middle of the Molco pedestrian walkways, invisible and untouchable to the living. The setting was serene, and the city never looked more marvelous in its evening glory.

His broken heart, however, felt far from marvelous. He had been out and about today, and he had caught sight of his beloved subordinate and latest crush Uzuki Yashiro holding hands with another man who appeared to have an infatuation with lollipops of all things. Just seeing this scene was enough to round off his happiness to zero.

And here he was, brooding and looking like he had just failed an arithmetic test. Sho Minamimoto, a mathematical prodigy, failing math? Of course that was impossible. But that was what he _felt_ like at the moment. His world was shattered.

"Inverse matrix!" he muttered bitterly. "How could someone as great as me lose to an insignificant binomial like him? And how could she fall for him? Is she a factoring hectopascal or what? ! How could she not perceive my beauty, my intelligence, my brilliance? !"

He spat on the ground. "Dammit, this zetta bites. This just multiplied my day by all kinds of bleh. Valentine's Day, my digit!"

Refusing to give in to the tears, he whipped out his megaphone and started yelling at the top of his voice.

"Hear this, hectopascals!" he shouted insanely across the entire UG. "I have some brilliant love poems for you; you'd best listen! 3.1415926…"

Poor BJ, in the meantime, was still losing to the same kid he had been losing to in Tin Pin, but he refused to leave until he got at least one win against him. That proved to be quite difficult, however. The sadness and disappointment from being flatly rejected by the girl he was in love with was greatly affecting his performance in battle.

"Graah!" he almost screamed. "You punk! I just came here to blow off steam, and you're pouring it all back into me!"

The kid wiped the sweat from his brow with his red bandanna. He didn't look or feel sorry, not in the slightest.

"Sorry, bro," he said cheekily, "I'm on a roll this week. So I'm afraid I can't lose to anyone no matter what! You're gonna have to have mad skills like me, bro!"

"Smug little… I'll teach you! One more round! One mo– "

"WHAM!"

"What? !" The kid's reflexes were blazingly fast. BJ stood not a single chance. His pin got knocked off the edge of the playing field. Now he could chalk another one up for the number of losses he had for today. He had lost count by the time he reached fifty.

The crowd that had gathered around the table to watch laughed uproariously at BJ's latest embarrassing mishap. They had never seen someone suck so bad at Tin Pin.

"Heh heh, tough luck, bro!" said the kid, giving him a defiant thumbs-up. "Keep tryin'!"

"AAARGH! ! !"

Valentine's Day was not supposed to be so terrible.

How he wished he could erase the boy right then and there.


End file.
